Echoes and Polyphonies is a thesis in two parts, consisting of a critical study of the contemporary American poet Dan Beachy-Quick, and a manuscript of new poems, titled "Passage". Both portions of this thesis explore citational poetics and the multiplicity of the choral voice: as such the critical and creative works exist in conversation in a two-part work of practice-led research, and research-led practice. The critical thesis posits that throughout his writing Dan Beachy-Quick investigates the nature of lyric and lyric subjectivity, questioning the singularity of the lyric speaker. Beachy-Quick's poetry, largely published since the turn of the millennium, is concerned with the plural experience of the writer as one who is also a reader. I argue that Beachy-Quick addresses the nature of the lyric voice by linking the lyric speaker to the ancient Greek chorus, reading the written voice as necessarily plural. This thesis demonstrates that Beachy-Quick examines the nature of poetic speech through direct interrogation of echoic literary influence. Through an examination of Beachy-Quick's verse, I read the lyric voice as polyphonic in nature and consider the formal hybridities of contemporary American poetics. In doing so I draw on a range of critical approaches while offering close readings of Beachy-Quick's body of work. Goldsmith's and Perloff's writings provide a framework for reading "unoriginality" as part of the plural lyric voice. Carr and Robinson's Active Romanticism assists my reading of Beachy-Quick's destabilisation of the lyric voice as a continuation of the major shift in the understanding of literary subjectivity represented by Romanticism. These works assist my demonstration that Beachy-Quick's poetry participates in what I call an active lyric, a lyric that makes explicit its own polyphonic nature through citational poetics. I posit that Beachy-Quick's poetry is exemplary of the way in which a hybrid poetics allows contemporary poets to combine influences from multiple traditions and historical periods in order to both use and at the same time destabilise the lyric voice. As such, I argue that Beachy-Quick's poetry takes the investigation of the poetic speaker as its subject to an unusual degree, enabling his poetry to both embody and directly discuss his own poetic practice as a writer-reader. Following an introduction that includes a chronological overview of Beachy-Quick's career thus far, this thesis takes the shape of an 'inventory' that, in thirty interlinked short essays, examines Beachy-Quick's use of genre, poetic form, recurrent image, lyric voice and literary tradition from multiple angles. At the same time that these essays offer close readings of individual poems, they also offer discussion and theorisation of contemporary understandings of the lyric voice, experimental lyric hybridity and the relationship of that hybridity to the literary tradition. This inventorial approach creates a set of coordinates allowing for a networked reading that reflects the constellation of approaches and voices Beachy-Quick employs in his poetry. This examination of the lyric voice is also central to the book-length manuscript of my own poems titled "Passage". These poems share some thematic preoccupations with Beachy-Quick's work, such as an interest in literary and historic legacy, ecology and place; at the same time they also haunt and are haunted by other traditions and landscapes, exploring lyric inhabitation of time and space. My own creative preoccupations with animals, travel and exploration, science and science fiction emerge in both citational and non-citational new work. In these poems, I move between traditional lyric modes, such as the charm and ekphrasis, into the fragmentary and echoic lyric voice of the cento and processes of erasure. The juxtaposition of citational and non-citational forms allows me to emphasise the way that both "unoriginality" and chorality underpin my own individual poetic sensibility. This verse proposes both a renewal of and radical departure from received text.
Date of Award | 2016 |
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Original language | English |
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- Beachy-Quick
- Dan
- 1973-
- criticism and interpretation
- poetics
- poetry
Echoes and polyphonies : the choral poetics of Dan Beachy-Quick and Passage : new poems
Middleton, K. (Author). 2016
Western Sydney University thesis: Doctoral thesis